May 12, 2003

rant/protection

Posted by Arcane Gazebo at May 12, 2003 11:35 AM Lisa Schiffren's impressive feat of one-handed typing has attracted some attention. It almost attracted the contents of my stomach, but I managed to hold my lunch down somehow. There are still a few things I'm confused about, like how when Bush attacks Baghdad he's "vanquish[ing] a truly evil foe" but when Clinton attacks Baghdad he's conducting "[m]ilitary strikes to divert us from trials about lying about sex". I'm also confused about this quote from one of Schiffren's more coherent friends, "I think he is actually protecting me and my sons, and I find that attractive in a man."

I find this notion that Bush is protecting anybody very weird. Ok, he's good at protecting his own administration by refusing to release the findings of the 9/11 investigation. And he's protecting investors from the dividend tax. But that's about all I can come up with.

In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, we heard a lot about the need to protect Americans from Saddam's WMD. Bush gave us a whole laundry list of deadly materials he was certain could be found in Iraq. Hawks spun wild, frightening tales of nuclear explosions in Manhattan or Washington, D.C., and assured us that this would be the outcome if we failed to invade. I just have one question for those people who insisted war with Iraq was necessary to make us safe from WMD: